The developers at Unreal recommend that you work on lighting last, which is great advice especially when you still have to plan what to add to the level. I can’t help but adjust the knobs though, since so much of my game’s aesthetic is based on the lighting. I finished adding all the rooms to the main “hall,” next up is adding things to be in each room. I may have put too many rooms for my liking, thus giving me even more work to fill each one with detail. Most of the rooms are already copy-pasted, I don’t want the interiors to be exactly the same as well.
The composition of the lighting and the colors looks great for now. My issue is that in some spots it gets really dark, there’s some setting with the camera exposure that causes it to get too dark when focusing on some lights. I’ll try to figure out why that is happening. My plan for each room is to set them up as an office for a specific person, so I have to personalize them somehow. This will be the harder step of the level build, and I have a course lined up on how to do exactly this. Something about creating a detective’s office, that will be very informative for story-telling through the environment. Once I have more things set up then I can start figuring out how to take down notes or have objects in the world for the player to read. There has to be some investigation aspects in the game. I want there to be a reward for exploration, it’s not a terribly large place, but the least I can do it make it dense.
I added some points to swing from. Right now it’s very dark on the third level, it’s difficult to see anything because of the thick fog. Though without the fog the lighting isn’t as dramatic. Got some nice pictures of lighting, and the rooms unlit and from the top-down. I’m still thinking about if I want to add enemies, or I’ll keep it to one boss per level. We shall seeeeee. Onwards!
GoldenGratus Games 